- Blurb -
A boy who feels persecuted by the banality of everyday life yearns to ascend to the cold and majestic plane of the stars. A seamstress finds liberation of a sort in "becoming" a dog and howling at the moon. A club of young girls masquerade as the grieving fiancees of strange men. This book brings together these and other remarkable short stories by the Russian Symbolist Fyodor Sologub that explore the lengths to which people will go to transcend the mundane. Renowned as one of late imperial Russia' s finest stylists, Sologub bridges the great nineteenth-century novel and the fin-de-siecle avant-garde. He stands out for his masterful command of both realist and fantastic storytelling; his play with language evinces a belief in its capacity to access other worlds and other levels of meaning. Many of Sologub' s stories are set among children whose alienation from the adult world has lent them imagination and curiosity, enabling them to create an alternative reality. At the same time, he bluntly examines the sordid realities of late imperial Russian society and frankly presents sometimes unconventional sexuality. The book also features a selection of Sologub' s "little fairy tales," ambiguous parables couched in childlike language whose ingenuity anticipates the miniatures and "incidents" of Daniil Kharms. Susanne Fusso' s elegant translation offers these artful tales to an English-speaking audience.
- Reviews -
Sologub' s prose is beautiful: limpid, clear, balanced, poetical, but with a keen sense of measure. . . . -- Dmitri Svatopolk-Mirsky, author of A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 His vivid, honed, stinging style, which combines simplicity and elegance, coldness and fire, tenderness and austerity, keeps getting more and more supple. His anguishing conceptions more and more convincingly lift the cover of enchantment that all of reality turns out to be. He is the singer of death: but he sings of death with all the tenderness of a prayer, all the ardor of passion; he speaks of death the way a passionate lover speaks of his beloved. -- Andrey Bely Alternately funny and frightening, charming and chilling, Sologub' s short fiction remains curiously undervalued. Fusso' s excellently selected and masterfully translated collection, accompanied by an exemplary introduction and copious notes, finally allows readers of English to appreciate the full power of Sologub' s relentlessly double vision and the depth of his literary craft. -- Stanley J. Rabinowitz, Amherst College
- Author Bio -
Fyodor Sologub (the pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, 1863-1927) was a major Russian Symbolist poet and prose writer. The son of a tailor and a maid, he began his career as a provincial high-school teacher and attained literary fame in St. Petersburg at the turn of the twentieth century. He is best known for the novel The Petty Demon. Susanne Fusso is Marcus L. Taft Professor of Modern Languages and professor of Russian, East European, and Eurasian studies at Wesleyan University. Her translations include Nikolai Gogol' s The Nose and Other Stories (Columbia, 2020).
- Full Details -
Status: | Active |
ISBN-13: | 9780231200059 |
Published: | 7 Feb 2023 |
Published In: | United States |
Imprint: | Columbia University Press |
Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
Format: | Trade Paperback |
Height: | 216mm |
Width: | 140mm |
Pages: | 280 |
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